


Sleep Like a Shark Does

by ishie



Category: Big Bang Theory
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-16
Updated: 2013-12-16
Packaged: 2018-01-04 19:48:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1085023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishie/pseuds/ishie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The brief was short, only a single sheet of paper. Listed on it were: name, location, objective. A photo array would be clipped to the inside of the folder as well, but things didn't make it as far as that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleep Like a Shark Does

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weasleytook](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weasleytook/gifts).



> For Lisa, for Saturnalia. <33333 I'm sorry it's not miles better because you deserve the absolute best. Merry Saturnalia!
> 
> Thank you forever to Jen for the beta. Title from the Unknown Mortal Orchestra song and all hail Beyoncé for soundtracking my meltdown and my last BBT hurrah(?)! Only I was harmed in the making of this fic. All my love to the fabulous friends I made at Paradox—who let all you wonderful people on the internet in the first place, anyway?

"Send me to Siberia."

"Agent Witsen..."

"I'll walk the length of Turkmenistan in sandals. I'll replace all the LEDs on Fremont Street, whatever, I don't care! Just get me out of here. I can't take it anymore."

"We can't torpedo a long-term assignment just because you need a break. Take a weekend, think it over. If you still feel that way when you get back, we'll talk. "

The line was silent for a long moment.

"That man sat outside my door and talked at me for _fifty-seven minutes_ about the merits of sperm donation for pay versus other bodily fluids. He had _charts_. I'm done. I know you've got somebody you can roll in here to replace me. Get the dude who busted up that thing in Charming. I don't care. I've done some hairy shit, ma'am, but one more day in this waking nightmare and I'm going to strangle him."

The director pinched the bridge of her nose and switched to the intercom line.

"Mark, we just lost another one."

"Pasadena?"

"Of course," she sighed. "At least this one didn't call en route to Pyongyang. Listen, get me whoever's available. Anybody."

"The only one in town is... Well, are you sure you need someone right this minute?"

"Just get her in here."

 

\---

 

The brief was short, only a single sheet of paper. Listed on it were: name, location, objective. A photo array would be clipped to the inside of the folder as well, but things didn't make it as far as that.

"Known aliases?"

The director sighed and pulled her hand back from the folder she had been nudging ever farther across the desk. Things never made it as far as that. Not once in the six years she'd been running this agent out of this cramped, ugly, too-cold office. Her entire process of assigning new cases, honed over decades, with hundreds of agents and thousands of analysts, crumbled like a cafeteria muffin as soon as Mark announced the arrival of Agent—

"I take it that means no known aliases."

"Can't you just read the file? They spend a lot of time distilling all the relevant information down into this for you."

"Since _they_ sync it to my laptop, too, wouldn't that be time better spent on... I don't know, maybe locking down one or two of these threats a little faster so I don't have to work so hard? I had plans, ma'am. I'm supposed to be in St. Moritz."

"It should go without saying that this takes priority, Agent. St. Moritz will still be there when you're done." And whoever she'd snared into accompanying her likely would be, as well. The agent's legendary zest for conquest ranged well beyond her official assignments, to the regret of those within the service who had to clean up after her escapades. No one who accounted for another of her notches ever seemed to complain, though.

Quickly, before she lost her audience entirely, the director rattled off the rest of the specifics. "Cover said to recycle the ID you used for the ring in Missouri. Less of the meth, more of the ditz. They'll clean up the particulars so you'll stand up to any checking-up. Now, there's a friendly already in place—SIS, if I'm not mistaken—but it's an insular group, so we estimate five days to infiltrate at least."

"Wait, he's a physicist, right? The roommate, too?" She blinked a few times, rapidly, as if smoke were blowing in her eyes. "Take me two hours, tops."

Sure it would. Louise, with sixteen years more experience, had been in place for almost a year with only a few laptop emergencies to show for it. And before that, the erstwhile Joyce Kim had managed it, but barely. She'd lasted all of six weeks before fleeing to North Korea.

"There's a church called St Andrews nearby. Drop a spike if you need anything urgent, otherwise the normal channels will suffice."

The director flipped open the folder and scanned the contents quickly to see if she'd forgotten anything. When she looked up again, the agent had already stalked halfway across the room. The director managed to shout one last instruction before the door slammed shut.

"Don't hurt this one! We will literally never hear the end of it."

 

\---

 

Boxes and candy-colored junk were strewn all over the otherwise empty apartment, doing little to distract from its size and shabbiness. An insipid pop CD was already in the player with a post-it stuck to the open lid.

_Save yourself._

"You're hilarious," she said aloud. Whoever was on surveillance was probably pissing themselves. Once she made contact, the first thing she was going to do was disable the audio feeds. Not before they got an earful of whatever bullshit they'd left for her, though.

She propped open the door to the hallway and pulled a handful of crap out of the nearest box. The asset and his roommate were out picking up lunch, according to the latest status update. With any luck they'd turn up before the music had a chance to burrow into her long-term memory.

Minutes later, she heard movement on the stairs and upraised voices. From the stultifyingly boring argument and nasal whining were a pretty good bet it was who she was waiting for. Up went the volume on the CD player and down went her newly blonde hair. The shorts were tiny enough that it was probably impossible for them to show any more skin than they already were, but a tug brought them almost an inch closer to her bikini line. Perfect. 

She waited until she heard one of them make a crack about someone's eczema before she couldn't take it anymore. 

"Oh, hi!"

"Hi."

" _Hi._ "

" _Hi._ "

"Hi."

_Bingo._

"Hi?"

 

\---

 

"He's kind of a _nerd_. Juice box?"

"Oh, no thanks! I'm not a big juice girl, really."

"What kind of girl are you?"

"You know those big iced coffees? The kind with big sweet mounds of whipped cream and caramel drizzled all over? And your hands get all sticky from the cup and you can't stop licking your fingers because it tastes so good.... You know?"

Howard nodded weakly, sweat popping out on his forehead.

"That's the kind of girl I am. Do you know if anywhere around here has those?"

Howard had to stumble to his feet before he landed face-first in her lap. "YES! I mean, I'll go! I'll get you one! Uh, right now, your wish is my command, milady."

He was out the door and pounding down the stairs before she realized the other nerd was still sitting on the couch.

"Nicely done."

"He seemed the type." She pulled her hair back off her face and tied it in a loose knot. "Good to see you, by the way. Where was it last time? The Orinoco?"

"Or thereabouts."

"I've got a couple of goodies to drop off. Mind giving me a hand?"

He put out his hand for the bugs and took a good long look. "We have some of our own in here already, but the more the merrier, I suppose."

"A few more eyes can't hurt." _Especially if it meant they'd be less focused on what she was doing across the hall._ Long-term assignments were never her strong suit

Going to the bookcases that ran the length of the inner wall, she started scanning for the least-used sections. There was hardly any dust, even on the lowest shelves.

"So what the hell kind of a cover is not being able to speak to women, anyway? I mean, it's better than struggling actress, but pretty much anything would be."

Penny wasn't expecting much of a reaction—they were professionals, after all—and Tony, no! Here he was Raj. _Raj_ didn't give her one. He kept running his hand inside the couch cushion unzipped on his lap, while she squeezed book spines and moved up to the jumble of junk on the top shelf of the bookcase closest to the closet.

"It's not part of my cover," he said after a few minutes. The exaggerated South Asian accent slid into something closer to his regular crisp public-schoolboy accent. "It's a dictate. I, well, there was an incident in—"

"Yeah, I heard about Ville-Marie."

"Of course you did. Everyone has heard about Ville-Marie," he grumbled.

Her nail caught on something partially covered by the base of a large globe. She snapped to get Raj's attention and moved a pile of notebooks out of the way. A barely-visible copper wire snaked up the wall a few feet in the shadow of the door frame, and through a pinhole into the closet. Inside, Penny snapped on the light and carefully pried the small transmitter out of the hole that had been carved into the wood where no one but the Jolly Green Giant could see it. 

"Yours?"

Raj shook his head.

It broke under her bare heel with a satisfying crack. 

Raj's mouth turned down like he was trying out for a Stallone remake. They should have made him the Hollywood wannabe. Penny could have been a megageek, easy. 

"Last sweep was on Monday afternoon while they were at work," he said. "We've heard quite a bit of chatter from Tehran recently. I found a GPS tracker on one of Sheldon's belts, but that–" he nodded to the scattered pieces, "–that definitely wasn't there."

"Sure you didn't miss it?"

She'd had a cat once who gave less affronted looks than Raj did. "I don't miss things.".

 

\---

 

The CD was still spinning on repeat when she got back inside the little rathole she'd be calling home for the next however-long. She smirked up at the light fixture where the camera likely was and nudged the volume a little higher.

Her new phone was pink with sparkles and preprogrammed with an endless list of first-name-only contacts. She picked one at random—if everything was working as it should, all would connect to the voice-activated call routing system. 

"Kurt, you piece of shit" sent her call to the agent posing as her ex-boyfriend, who picked up on the second ring. 

"Turn that crap off, I'm begging you. Support's got it piped through all of our systems. I think my brain's bleeding."

"Only because you were so nice to the guys I sent over."

"You could have warned me you were sending—"

"And ruin a perfectly good chance to sic him on someone else? Hardly."

He sputtered a few more words, but she cut him off. 

"Listen, I've gotta run. I'm buying them dinner, so the apartment will be empty for at least ninety minutes. Two hours, tops. I found a bug in the closet. What's left of it is in my bathroom sink. Friendly said they've had intercepts from Tehran."

"Got it. Anything else?"

Someone knocked on the door, a quick three raps and a pause before repeating.

Sheldon was still in his tighty-whiteys in the hallway. The peephole in the door behind him was dark—Leonard or Howard, it was already hard to tell which of them was panting after her the hardest.

"Hi, Sheldon!" she chirped, pressing the phone to her shoulder and tipping a flirty look up at him, just in case. 

"CIA or ...?"

"I'm... uh, sorry? What?"

"You're hardly the first to use this apartment as a base of operations. Not even the first to use sexual enticements to gain entry to my social circle. Really, it's all so transparent it's hard to believe anyone still calls what you do 'covert'."

"Drop dead, Kurt!" she said, slamming the phone closed and whipping it over her shoulder to land in or on or near one of the boxes.

"Joyce Kim, Louie/Louise—"

"She prefers Louise, thanks."

"Noted."

"Does Leonard know?"

Sheldon scoffed, a weird high-pitched noise from the back of his throat. "Oh, please. He thinks I'm working on reconciling relativity."

"We're here for you, you know."

"Of course. And it's a boon, when it goes smoothly. Leonard still demands a significant portion of my days but Raj, or whatever his name is, is sufficient distraction to keep the bulk of Howard's nonsense away from me. If you can provide the same service, I have no objection to you continuing in your role."

She bit her lip to keep from laughing. She'd continue in it no matter what he had to say about it. Joyce Kim could have been an aberration, but Louise and the intern between them made a pattern.

"I appreciate that," she told him, hoping he was much worse at deciphering facial expressions than he was at busting her cover.

He nodded and turned to go, but she stopped him with a quick pull on the back of his t-shirt. 

Keeping her voice down so it wouldn't get picked up over the music still playing, she said, "I got to use one of your plasma rifles once, about three years ago. Nasty thing. Saved my ass but good."

Sheldon smirked, somehow looking completely in control, even with his bony legs shining pale under the flickering fluorescents.

"Of course it did. I'm very good at what I do, Penny. Let's hope you are, too."


End file.
